Remember those roaming regulations I warned about, where the FCC was going to set price controls? Remember how I warned it would worsen investment, and wouldn’t really increase competition? Oops, I was right. Sprint Nextel is actively reducing its rural wireless deployment in order to get a free ride on other carriers. (Cue the FCC apologists who will claim that I have something against Sprint, because they can’t argue the facts or the law).

Chuck Grassley, increasingly the beast of oversight in the Senate, is becoming quite a target. his Twitter account got hit and now he says he was the target of a bribe attempt over LightSquared. Even as LightSquared itself focuses its public comments purely on the technical matters of interference with GPS, the reaction to Chuck Grassley suggests there’s something going on in the White House that we need to know.

Barack Obama and the FCC are damaging LightSquared’s reputation with their silence, unfairly or no.